July 31, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:10:40
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unidentified
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... | |
| As you guys know, this show is fan-funded by you, the audience, through the crowdfunding platform Patreon. | ||
| Thanks to those of you who support what we do on Patreon, this show is not only independent, But we've built a totally professional home studio and have 100% control over all the content that we create for you every week. | ||
| There is literally nothing between me and you because Patreon has given us the tools to create a business behind the show, one of which I'm incredibly proud of. | ||
| The Patreon platform has enabled us to grow and expand the show, but also, and perhaps more importantly, allowed us to build an incredible community of people who care about free speech, And having thought-provoking and honest conversations. | ||
| As most of you know at this point, last week Patreon deleted the account of former guest of the Rubin Report Lauren Southern. | ||
| Many of you expressed frustration with Patreon, and we lost about 200 patrons and over $1,000 a month in support because people no longer wanted to support Patreon. | ||
| We've made some of that money back on PayPal, but that's totally besides the point. | ||
| As I said in a Patreon exclusive post that I put up last week, I'll respect any of your decisions related to your hard-earned money, and at the same time, Patreon itself is a private company and it can do whatever it deems best for its business. | ||
| At the same time, as a creator, but also as a consumer, I often find myself incredibly | ||
| frustrated with many of the platforms I use and the general lack of transparency from | ||
| these new media monoliths is becoming an increasing problem. | ||
| To Patreon's credit, their CEO Jack Conte called me and about half a dozen other creators | ||
| personally to explain the decision to remove Lauren's account. | ||
| During that call, which was just a couple days ago last Thursday, I asked Jack to come | ||
| on The Rubin Report to discuss Loren's ban and the company's commitment to free speech. | ||
| Jack immediately responded that he would love to come on and discuss this, which is something that CEOs of these companies pretty much never do. | ||
| I suspect that the conversation that we're about to have will be the nexus of so many of the issues that we talk about here every week, from free speech to new media, to silencing of dissent, to public versus private utilities, and much more. | ||
| With that in mind, I welcome Patreon CEO Jack Conte to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, that was my little prelude. | ||
| It's a great prelude. | ||
| I normally don't do live preludes, but there you go. | ||
| All right, so we have a lot to talk about and, you know, I always say at the end of my interviews that I think a good interview is when I don't look at my notes once. | ||
| Today, though, I am going to have to look because there's a lot of things we got to get to. | ||
| Great. | ||
| But I thought the way to kick this off would be that I consider Patreon one of the big four. | ||
| at least in the world that I'm in. | ||
| So we've got YouTube, we've got Facebook, we've got Twitter, and now Patreon. | ||
| I would say a bit more than Instagram, more than Snapchat, because you guys have given the tools to the creators. | ||
| We were all frustrated about demonization, lack of transparency, all of the things that I just mentioned. | ||
| And you guys have enabled, not only me to do what I do, but literally thousands of other people to do that. | ||
| That being said, Lauren Southern, just lay it out. | ||
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unidentified
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Why was Lauren's page deleted? | |
| So I made a video about this and posted it late last week. | ||
| Yeah, the main reason the page was deleted was because she, you know, and this crew of folks on this boat basically | ||
| pulled a boat in front of one of these NGO ships, which for us crossed the line | ||
| between speech and action. | ||
| And we went through the content policy and, you know, there's a line in our policy | ||
| that prohibits folks from like taking action that could lead to somebody dying. | ||
| Like if you, if you block a hospital entrance or if you park your car in front of an ambulance you can't do | ||
| that. | ||
| It's against our, it's against our content policy. | ||
| Very simply, like at the end of the day, that's why we took down our page. | ||
| So a lot of people were saying, were first asking me, well how did this come to your attention? | ||
| So this is one of the things that I asked. | ||
| So we talked for about 20 minutes, just in photo transparency. | ||
| And we just met for another two minutes right here. | ||
| But that was one of the things that a lot of people were asking, well, how did this get to your attention? | ||
| So there seems to be a little confusion as to whether this was bumped up by people complaining to you, meaning just patrons or just people outside of Patreon. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I'm going to sound probably a little dumb here, but I actually hadn't even heard of this hope not hate lobby thing until someone, I think I saw a tweet about it, maybe Saturday or Sunday. | ||
| I didn't even know that people were accusing them of having lobbied for this. | ||
| And I know very little about that organization. | ||
| So I can tell you how things get bumped up in our system. | ||
| We start seeing an influx of reports about something. | ||
| We saw the same with IGD. | ||
| Suddenly there was this massive influx of reports about IGD. | ||
| The same thing started happening with Lauren. | ||
| And as, like, more and more reports start coming in, the urgency of that thing starts to get intense, | ||
| As more and more reports start coming in, the urgency of that thing starts to get intense, | ||
| especially if the complaints coming in are, like, giving detailed evidence or have screenshots. | ||
| especially if the complaints coming in are giving detailed evidence or have screenshots. | ||
| Or I mentioned in this video, there's this concept called manifest observable behavior | ||
| I mentioned in this video, there's this concept called manifest observable behavior | ||
| that makes it a little easier if somebody has done something | ||
| that makes it a little easier if somebody has done something | ||
| that's literally trackable, traceable. | ||
| There's a tweet of it, there's a screenshot, there's a video. | ||
| And when we start getting a lot of those sorts of reports, the team will escalate the thing and make a decision. | ||
| So that's exactly what happened. | ||
| And then, when was it, two weeks ago that we made the decision to take the page down? | ||
| Right, so as far as you know, it wasn't lobbying. | ||
| Because it sounds like, because at least there are some tweets | ||
| that would lead people to believe that Hope Not Hate did lobby you guys. | ||
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unidentified
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But you're saying as far as you know, that's not how it got on your- If they lobbied Patreon, they didn't lobby me. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit more about manifest observable behavior? | ||
| Because I watch your video, obviously, and I never heard the phrase before. | ||
| I like to think that I know a little bit about these types of things. | ||
| Was that phrase itself actually in the TOS, the Terms of Service? | ||
| Yeah, in our content policy when we talk about how to scale the team and how to make a good decision, how to make sure that you're not making decisions based on ideology or other things, we use this term manifest observable behavior. | ||
| And really what it means is, look, you don't know a person's intention, right? | ||
| You don't know what their motivation is. | ||
| If someone says, I am going to burn down the DMV. | ||
| And then they make a video of themselves burning down a building and then they, uh, you know, uh... | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| They raise money and they buy gas and matches. | ||
| Those things add up and you can see the campaign to raise money, you can see the threat in Twitter, you can see the statements from the person, you can see a video of them burning down another building practicing. | ||
| Those are all examples of manifest, observable behavior. | ||
| Here's a person who has burned down a practice building, they have made a threat, and they add up to what we would call a credible threat. | ||
| Right, so I think a lot of people would hear that example and say, okay, that's a pretty concrete example. | ||
| What I'm hearing from a lot of Lauren's people is that what happened with these boats, that A, there's an argument to be made that what these boats are doing is illegal, that they're not actually rescuing people, that these are actually migrant boats that are in effect doing something illegal by bringing people across borders that they're not supposed to, and that she herself never used any of her money Yeah. | ||
| So, two points on that. | ||
| And I'm happy to have a discussion about, like, who is a refugee and who is a migrant and who gets to make that decision and what is to be done about it. | ||
| I want to separate that discussion from content policy, because it turns out they're very different things. | ||
| Content policy is about manifest, observable behavior. | ||
| Who is a migrant and who is a refugee is a separate discussion that actually has nothing to do with content policy. | ||
| And then your other question, so let's talk about that. | ||
| Your other question specifically was about, what was it? | ||
| Well, her funds. | ||
| So our content policy is divided into sections. | ||
| This is where Patreon is a little bit different than other platforms. | ||
| And we have to because we're sending people money. | ||
| There's like three sections of our content policy. | ||
| And sorry if I'm getting really specific here. | ||
| I mean, this is exactly why we're doing this. | ||
| Plus, you know, people don't really share their content policies in detail. | ||
| And I don't want Patreon to be one of those companies. | ||
| I want to share our content policy. | ||
| So the three main sections of the content policy are like, look, you can't do it or fund it on Patreon. | ||
| That's the first section. | ||
| That's like if you, you know, everything from like hate speech to, you know, Horrible things, child pornography, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| You can't do a funny thing. | ||
| But wait, let's pause there, because the hate speech thing, I know the bells are going to be going off with a lot of my audience, and me, myself, too. | ||
| How do you guys define what hate speech is? | ||
| So it's defined in great detail in the policy, in terms of certain things that are allowed, certain things that are not allowed. | ||
| But the point is, there's this section of the content policy that specifically mandates the things that you can do and can't do on Patreon, the platform itself. | ||
| Not like on Twitter, but on Patreon the platform itself. | ||
| The second section is you can't do it no matter where you're doing it, as long as you're a creator on Patreon. | ||
| In other words, if you are committing money laundering somewhere else, but you're using Patreon to fund your weekly flute music, It doesn't matter that you're not using your funds that you're making on Patreon for your money laundering operation or for your, like if you've got a weapons and bombs manufacturing facility. | ||
| So basically, even if you're doing something that has no connection, but that's pretty much an illegal activity is what you're talking about, right? | ||
| Because you're talking about bombs and money laundering. | ||
| Is there something else that wouldn't? | ||
| No, it's not always law. | ||
| I think actually most of the things are probably illegal, like violent crime, and there's property crime, and there's other things in that section of the content policy. | ||
| But no, there is a strict separation between law and content policy. | ||
| Those are also different discussions. | ||
| So it's not always illegal things. | ||
| Sometimes it's just things that we don't want on Patreon, like pornography. | ||
| Totally legal. | ||
| Totally okay if you want to do that. | ||
| If you want to do it elsewhere, fine. | ||
| But you can't do it on Patreon. | ||
| And it's not because it's bad. | ||
| It's just we don't want pornography on Patreon. | ||
| That's not the mission of the company. | ||
| The mission of the company is to help creators. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| By the way, as I say on my show all the time, and I said at the top, you guys are a private company and you're allowed to do whatever you want. | ||
| I've tried to be very honest with my audience with that. | ||
| Now, if that upsets them, they don't have to fund me at all, but they certainly don't have to fund me on Patreon. | ||
| So I'm not here to hammer you on why you've created. | ||
| These are the policies you've created. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and at the end of the day, that's the way we think about it, which again is why we distinguish between law and content policy. | ||
| They really are different discussions. | ||
| The third section of the content policy is like, look, even if you're not doing it now, you can't ever have done these things and be a creator on Patreon. | ||
| And that's things like terrorism and cybercrime, etc. | ||
| Yeah, so I don't wanna whittle down too much with the migrant versus immigrant versus refugee thing because A, as you're saying, this is a separate issue. | ||
| You guys have your policies that are not legal policies for a nation. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But I do think there's something important here because what I'm hearing from a lot of these people, as I said, is that these ships are not doing exactly what it sounded like you were saying in the video, that they actually are transporting, intentionally transporting migrants So in effect, they're doing something illegal, and the Defend Europe people are actually defending the borders of Europe, so to speak. | ||
| I'm just laying out the case. | ||
| I'm not even saying whether I agree with that or not. | ||
| And by the way, it sounds very all over the place with that. | ||
| It sounds like some of them are actual refugees, some of them are migrants, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| But you're saying that, is that completely irrelevant in this? | ||
| It's totally irrelevant. | ||
| Yeah, it actually has nothing to do with the content quality decision, and I can explain why. | ||
| So, let's say a person on Patreon blocks an ambulance. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Can't do that. | ||
| But then somebody could say, well, that ambulance was on its way to pick up person X, who we know is a convicted felon, and did something, and then they lay out something really horrible that that person has done. | ||
| Does that make it, like, let's say it's a terrible person that that ambulance was about to save. | ||
| Let's say they're about to save whoever. | ||
| It's like, think of the worst person in the world that they're about to save. | ||
| A lot of the people in the audience are thinking of me right now. | ||
| Okay, so let's say, like, that person was about to save Jack Conte. | ||
| He was dying of a heart attack. | ||
| I was going to say Hitler. | ||
| Let's make this a little easier. | ||
| So you could say, okay, well, they've blocked the ambulance. | ||
| Now you could say, well, the ambulance was going to pick up a terrible person anyway, so it's okay that they blocked the ambulance in this particular case. | ||
| No, you can't say that. | ||
| Because now Patreon is suddenly in the business of investigating truths based on opinions on this migrant and refugee issue. | ||
| There are papers published from universities and organizations on both sides of the issue, like, okay, what percentage of the people are actually, you know, like, legitimate refugees? | ||
| And then there's also international law, which says, like, look, anyone who's seeking asylum is considered an asylum seeker and is given, like, certain international rights, etc. | ||
| If you start getting into those issues, it becomes an impossible issue to tackle. | ||
| So where we draw the line as a private company is like, look, you can't block an ambulance, no matter who that ambulance is going to pick up. | ||
| So to that point... | ||
| Had those videos that Lauren created been exactly the same, but had she just not said to the, it sounds like she said to the captain, to the ship, or whoever was in charge, get in front, get in front. | ||
| It was a little unclear to me, did she mean get in front so that she could videotape more or whatever? | ||
| So I think there's a little bit of language stuff there. | ||
| But is what you're saying that had she not said any of that, any sort of direction to these people, but just been on board, you know, recording what was happening, that this wouldn't have happened? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And by the way, it is very, very clear to me, if you watch the video again, she's not saying, like, get in front of the ship so I can film more. | ||
| She literally says, get in front, get in front, they have to stop. | ||
| Like, legally, they have to stop if we're in front of the boat. | ||
| It's very clear, like, what she's saying, what she's instructing the boat operator to do. | ||
| If they're on the side of the boat with signs waving and screaming and yelling and exercising their right to speak, awesome. | ||
| You can have a Patreon page. | ||
| But, you know, and you can do the same with a hospital. | ||
| You stand outside a hospital, say whatever you want to say. | ||
| We're not going to stop you from doing that. | ||
| There are other things that Lauren has done that, like, hey, we're not going to stop her from doing those things, even though, like, me personally, I disagree with some of those things, but I'm not going to stop her from doing those things. | ||
| And in this particular case, like the second you actually turn that speech into action, that's the line in our content policy. | ||
| So yeah, I mean literally it has to do with the fact that she instructed the boat operator to pull their boat in front of theirs. | ||
| Yeah, so I want to get a little more into the speech and action thing because obviously that goes to the heart of a lot of what we talk about here. | ||
| When you guys were talking about manifest observable behavior, did you realize that the acronym for it was MOB? | ||
| No. | ||
| I did not realize that. | ||
| Observable behavior. | ||
| But I, so when that came to my mind, I thought there is an element of this | ||
| that feels a little bit like mob rule to me, which is that there are certain things that, | ||
| like I'm pretty sure that regardless of your own political opinion, | ||
| you would admit that, you know, tech companies and Silicon Valley | ||
| and San Francisco and all that, it leans pretty far left, | ||
| it leans pretty far progressive and all that. | ||
| And I think one of the reasons that Patreon is so successful is that you guys have become the sort of refuge for a lot of the people that feel like we're being treated unfairly on those things, where my videos don't get monetized on YouTube, They're unclear about the algorithm, you know, I see people being unsubscribed all the time, all that. | ||
| And I think partly what a lot of your creators are fearing now is that mob rule, mob meaning a big group of people, but also this acronym here, will just sort of kick in. | ||
| That eventually, that Lauren, although this may be completely within the lines of what you guys have set out, that It will just eventually get to a place where anyone who's doing anything, it'll just get kicked up enough and that you'll just be under pressure, sort of that the dam has broke already. | ||
| I think that's a big fear here. | ||
| No, I just completely disagree with that. | ||
| And anybody who's watching who's worried about that. | ||
| Yeah, we're just, it's a different system. | ||
| The reason this is happening on these other platforms is because of pressure from advertisers, right? | ||
| All of their dollars are coming from advertisers. | ||
| And advertisers are very picky around what type of content they want to run their ads against. | ||
| When you have, right, in all these other media companies, the stakeholders are viewer, fan, employee, investor, shareholder, advertiser. | ||
| Adding an advertiser to that list of stakeholders completely changes the nuance and organization of the ecosystem. | ||
| And it changes the stakes of the ecosystem. | ||
| And it changes the content itself, unfortunately. | ||
| That's one of the things that Patreon is fighting. | ||
| I hate the fact that literally my videos on YouTube, somebody who has nothing to do with my relationship with my fans or the platform itself, gets to It gets to decide whether or not I make money on these videos or not. | ||
| That sucks for me. | ||
| I hate that. | ||
| And so we have completely removed advertisers from the model itself, right? | ||
| Advertisers are not stakeholders in the Patreon ecosystem. | ||
| If they're scared about this particular type of content or that particular type of content, it doesn't matter. | ||
| They can pull their ads on YouTube, they have zero effect on the content on Patreon. | ||
| That's really important to us and it'll stay that way. | ||
| Why not just let everyone use the platform for whatever they want, and if in a case that something's illegal, let the legal system deal with it? | ||
| I've heard that from a lot of people, and there is a huge piece of me that sort of agrees with that. | ||
| That just, it's a platform, anyone can do it. | ||
| The second you cross a legal line, it's no longer a Patreon issue, it's now a legal issue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you're saying, why isn't content policy just law? | ||
| Why have content policy at all? | ||
| Well, for you in this case, why not just let the policy be, we let anyone that's creating be here. | ||
| The second you do something that is actually illegal, well now, it's not within our purview anymore. | ||
| It's now to something much bigger than us. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| The answer to that question is, again, I think relatively simple, but then if you dive into it, It's not. | ||
| The answer is Patreon has a mission, right? | ||
| We have a purpose for existing. | ||
| Law has a mission too. | ||
| Law's purpose is different than Patreon's purpose. | ||
| And so we need a different set of rules to govern our mission and to describe and to propel our mission forward. | ||
| And so we've developed a set of rules that propel our mission. | ||
| And again, it's not that it's counter to law. | ||
| It's literally just like a little bit, you know, it's a little bit of a different direction. | ||
| Like, for example, pornography. | ||
| I don't want porn on Patreon. | ||
| And again, it's not that I think porn should be illegal, or I don't think people should be looking at porn. | ||
| It's just that that's not Patreon's mission. | ||
| And so if we have porn on Patreon, it changes the egos. | ||
| It changes the entire ecosystem, right? | ||
| People start to think of Patreon as a porn site if there's too much porn on Patreon. | ||
| And then suddenly folks like you and others think, ah, I don't want to use Patreon. | ||
| And that hurts our mission, right? | ||
| Because we start turning away the kinds of creators that we want to be on the platform. | ||
| So it turns out, like, you have to have some set of rules to govern your ecosystem that are effectively a model of your mission, your purpose for existence. | ||
| And these are the rules that describe the mission that we have. | ||
| Do you think that there's some sort of slippery slope aspect to this words and action thing? | ||
| Because it's one of the things that I've been talking about for a while here, which is that if you keep labeling everyone Nazis, and then you're okay with punching Nazis, then you can blow up a Nazis car. | ||
| We've created something here, and I say this because I know for many of the people that I've had on this show, The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, has listed people that I'm now friends with and know well, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Majid Nawaz and Brigitte Gabriel, anti-Muslim extremists. | ||
| These people could not be... Majid himself is Muslim. | ||
| Ayaan was born Muslim. | ||
| I mean, these people could not be anything further from that. | ||
| But I could see a situation where one of them perhaps would try to get on Patreon, Your team would do a little digging and go, well, they did say this and then there was some violence, not that they called directly for violence, but that slippery slope part of that, how cognizant are you of that? | ||
| So, we're not gonna look at what the press says, right? | ||
| We're not gonna look at an article- Do you not at all, because there were a couple of pretty terrible articles written about me that talked about Patreon as well. | ||
| Mother Jones wrote a really awful libelous piece about me, further to the right than Breitbart or something, Der Spiegel. | ||
| And they, by the way, in both cases mentioned Patreon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you're saying that stuff has nothing to do, whether it gets across your desk or not, has nothing to do with any of this? | ||
| That's not in our content policy. | ||
| Like, what one particular paper says about a person or someone's opinion about a person, not in our content policy. | ||
| You can't scale a system based on other people's opinions about people on your platform. | ||
| That would be ineffective and just bad content policy. | ||
| So no, I don't care who says what about you or anyone else. | ||
| We care what you do, right? | ||
| We care what the behaviors are that are or are not against the content policy. | ||
| And by the way, gosh, one thing I feel like I just have to say, I want to send this message. | ||
| That's why you're here, bring it. | ||
| Like most creators, like creators watching this, You just don't have to worry about this shit. | ||
| You just don't have to worry about it. | ||
| Like, people like you and people, most people who are, like, engaging in healthy dialogue and talking about tough issues, like, this is just not something that concerns most creators. | ||
| And it, like, kills me a little bit that there's this fear. | ||
| You know, one of the things Sam Harris said in the podcast where he talked about leaving Patreon | ||
| was like, there's this wave of de-platformings. | ||
| And it kills me that there's that fear there and it doesn't have to be there for most creators. | ||
| So I think the issue is that we've, for so many of us who I referenced earlier | ||
| who have come to Patreon as a refuge from this nonsense, we're the same people who have been calling out | ||
| all of this craziness on campuses, all of this silencing of dissent, | ||
| all of this firing people over a joke and all of this other nonsense. | ||
| So I think that's why, if in your opinion, the fear is overblown, | ||
| From where I sit, it's very much rational, because we were all like, look, you're in my home right now. | ||
| I can afford to do this, and this studio, that when you walked in, you were very impressed by, I can do this because of the platform you created. | ||
| So that's why this is, to me, this is the most, in a certain way, this is the most personal interview that I've ever done, in an odd way. | ||
| Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that the fear is overblown. | ||
| The fear is legitimate and real. | ||
| What kills me about it is that people are starting to, like, that Sam was worried about. | ||
| One of the questions you asked me on the phone was like, hey, if I bring someone on the show that you guys don't agree with, like, is my show at risk? | ||
| That's what kills me. | ||
| The answer is a resounding no. | ||
| Your show is not at risk. | ||
| Talking about issues, again, I can't stress how important that is. | ||
| The difference between pulling your ship in front of another ship and what we're doing here in this room or what you do with any person who's of any particular opinion in this room. | ||
| That is a very different behavior. | ||
| So for the record, you did say to me, I just want it so that this is out on YouTube forever. | ||
| You said to me, my channel, not to make this about me, but that my channel has 0% chance of being deleted. | ||
| I think you said something very similar to my friend Colin Moriarty, and I suspect you probably said it to a couple people, other people that I don't know. | ||
| If your content is anything like the content that you have been doing so far, it's not going to get deleted. | ||
| It's just not something you'll have to worry about. | ||
| So what if I brought Lauren back on the show next week? | ||
| Great! | ||
| You should bring Lauren back on the show. | ||
| You should have healthy dialogue with people about this. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Anything less would be crazy. | ||
| Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I'm with you on that. | ||
| So you can understand why it's a legit fear, though, because of how we sort of all got here and the deplatforming and all that. | ||
| This was the first time where we saw deplatforming on the thing that we all went to because of deplatforming. | ||
| I totally understand how it's legit fear. | ||
| I guess what I was trying to express was that I don't like that that fear is associated with Patreon. | ||
| Because at the end of the day, we have a much higher tolerance of stuff because we don't have advertisers. | ||
| It just makes such a big difference. | ||
| That's why we have been able to do what we do. | ||
| Yeah, do you think there's some sort of inherent risk, though, about partly what we do with our money once we put that money into action? | ||
| So, for example, if I was funding gay people getting out of Saudi Arabia, let's say, which I suspect would probably be something that you, Jack Conte, were probably before, or I was funding, you know, free speech activists, bloggers in Bangladesh or something, Now that's an action that I'd be putting, using the money that I created here. | ||
| I think in those two cases you would be for those actions, so it wouldn't be a problem. | ||
| But there could be a situation, I can't think of one off the top of my head, that I might want to put money behind something that you wouldn't be thrilled with. | ||
| I don't mean you as the company, I don't mean Jack. | ||
| I love to talk about examples, but when we're gonna talk about examples, we have to be ultra-specific to really figure out if this is something that is or isn't against the content policy, right? | ||
| Because the content policy is long, and there's a lot of things. | ||
| So just to whittle it down a little bit, let's use the example. | ||
| If I was funding or helping somehow, or becoming an activist in an organization that was helping gay people get out of Saudi Arabia, Let's use that one as just the straight-up example. | ||
| Well, I would say, have you done any of the things in our content policy that are against the content policy? | ||
| And if you haven't, then you can keep doing it. | ||
| Right, but what if those organizations were also doing anti-government activities in Saudi Arabia? | ||
| The point that I'm trying to get to is that it's hard to, at some point you can whittle everything down to, you know, well, the U.S. | ||
| is allies with Saudi Arabia, are you funding dissent in the Saudi Arabian government? | ||
| But see, none of that, right? | ||
| That's why we base everything on manifest observable behavior, so we don't have to, like, because otherwise you literally can't deal with those sorts of issues, unless you have the tweet from the person that says, I'm going to bomb this building in order to accomplish my | ||
| mission or whatever, then we've got a credible threat and we take action. | ||
| But if somebody is not breaking the content policy, then it doesn't matter what you're trying to do. | ||
| Of course you can take action, as long as none of those actions are against things that | ||
| are in the content policy. | ||
| Sorry, I sound a little bit like I'm a broken record here. | ||
| Content policy. | ||
| That's why you have really clear spelled out content policy that's based on behavior. | ||
| Not on ideology or other things like that. | ||
| Getting away from Patreon for just a sec so that you don't have to say content policy again. | ||
| Can you just talk to me a little bit about what you feel like the general culture is in Silicon Valley | ||
| and all that around this stuff? | ||
| I suspect you're probably going to get some hate from CEOs, some who you don't even know, just for doing this. | ||
| Because that culture, as I said before, of lack of transparency, | ||
| the inability to connect with any of these people, is again another reason why we all came to Patreon. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think I'm going to get hate from CEOs. | ||
| I think the one thing that I actually really appreciate about the culture in Silicon Valley is... | ||
| Despite the fact that I think people could do more to be transparent, a lot more to be transparent with communities and users, people are very transparent with each other. | ||
| There's a lot of sharing and a lot of discussion and dialogue. | ||
| CEOs are constantly helping each other out. | ||
| So I will frequently call up other CEOs and ask them questions. | ||
| And it's amazing. | ||
| It's so different. | ||
| Because right before this, I was in the music industry for 10 years. | ||
| You are alone on an island in the music industry. | ||
| I felt isolated from other folks. | ||
| If you want to figure out how much you pay a guitar player when you go on tour with them, what's a good weekly rate to pay a guitar player? | ||
| It's freaking tough to answer that question if you're an independent musician. | ||
| I mean, you've got to call a lot of people, there's no data, it's not organized. | ||
| If you want to figure out, you know, how much do you pay this kind of employee, whatever, a designer or an engineer that has like three years of experience and has worked at these companies, There are so many public databases that organize compensation data for employees, and it becomes actually a very solvable problem to figure out how much do you pay employees. | ||
| And that has to do with companies just being willing and open to share with each other. | ||
| So I'd say one of the main things about the culture is discussion. | ||
| So for that reason, I do not think I'm going to get a lot of hate from CEOs. | ||
| I think people will talk about this, and it'll just be something that people discuss and share with each other. | ||
| All right, we got away from Patreon specifically for a second. | ||
| I was giving you a minute there to go macro on it. | ||
| So for the people that get what you're saying about manifest observable behavior, they get what I'm saying about sort of the slippery slope of all of this. | ||
| I think there's going to be a certain amount of people that no matter what you say are gonna say, wait, the dam broke here, now he, One day, you're going to get protested by a certain amount of people. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They're gonna start looking at your creators, whether they've done anything or not. | ||
| I can't even think of anyone off the top of my head. | ||
| Or they could go, look, they've got Ruben on, they've got Colin on. | ||
| He was in Hot Water for some stuff, for a tweet he sent, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| We've already seen that these guys kind of cave. | ||
| So you're giving me absolute assurances that it's simply about that and no more. | ||
| That the stake is in the ground and this is the place that you guys won't move from. | ||
| We have our content policy as it stands now. | ||
| I think it's a good, rigorous, solid content policy. | ||
| Personally, I spent like two months building this policy with an expert who had literally scaled a trust and safety team to like a massive operation with lots of people working on this stuff and literally was like training computers on how to automatically identify Some awful things that are like should not be okay. | ||
| Child pornography, etc. | ||
| And was literally like training algorithms to identify this kind of stuff. | ||
| This person was an absolute expert in content policy. | ||
| I feel really, really good about this policy. | ||
| I think, like anything, content policy is going to change and adopt over time. | ||
| So what I'm not going to say is like, hey, our content policy is going to be exactly the same five years from now. | ||
| That's just not true. | ||
| What I can say is that I think, personally, I want to build a platform. | ||
| I want Patreon to be a company that values free speech, that values creators, that wants to pay creators, that wants to put people in that mission, that wants to put people in that world where they're making money and where they can buy a studio like this. | ||
| That's what's important to me. | ||
| And again, it comes down to the things that you're doing. | ||
| If you're gonna take action that's gonna hurt a person, we're just not gonna be okay with that. | ||
| So one of the things that you addressed in the video that you put up is that the way you guys went about doing this may have been a little sloppy, or perhaps not the best way of doing it. | ||
| That you deleted her channel, there was no chance of recourse or anything like that. | ||
| So you are gonna change that, correct? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That was not good. | ||
| And like, I'm fine saying that. | ||
| I mean, I think, you know, part of doing this is like acknowledging when you've made a mistake. | ||
| It wasn't a good email that we sent her. | ||
| That's not the kind of company that we want to be. | ||
| It's not the company that I want to build. | ||
| I feel bad about that. | ||
| Did no one think that if this was completely objectable and completely the reverse of what your TOS is that still she should at least get a chance? | ||
| Or was that even discussed beforehand? | ||
| So at the end of the day it comes down to systems design. | ||
| system is gonna is gonna have certain failure points that's what we saw here | ||
| it's not yeah it's it would be wrong to say that there's like a person who was | ||
| like ah we need to stick it to somebody right like that's just not what happened | ||
| I think it's easy to think that that's what's happened you know happened from | ||
| the outside but you know from the inside what happened was you know we had these | ||
| systems we had these procedures we went through a system and it ain't going | ||
| through that we realized gosh this was not the right way to do it. | ||
| And so we're going to change the system. | ||
| We're going to build an appeals process. | ||
| We're going to build a warning system. | ||
| We're going to invest in external comms with creators, because that's super important. | ||
| It builds trust with the community. | ||
| And yeah, we didn't do a good job there. | ||
| I feel bad about that. | ||
| Do you have a timeline for any of that stuff? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So by the end of the year, we're going to be doubling the size of the trust and safety team. | ||
| That's going to allow us to do things like invest in the appeals process, et cetera. | ||
| So, would Lauren herself be allowed to appeal? | ||
| What happened at this point? | ||
| Gosh, I hadn't thought about that. | ||
| We don't have the appeal system in place. | ||
| If she wanted to appeal, if she wanted to be like, hey, this isn't fair, personally, yeah, like, great. | ||
| We would look at it again. | ||
| I don't think there's anything that we missed. | ||
| If there's new evidence, we'd be happy to look at it. | ||
| Well, let's say just right now, if she accepted that, okay, by the end of the year, they're gonna take care of this stuff. | ||
| But in the meantime, since she happens to be the person that's going through this right now, if she was to contact you directly or the team or whatever and say, you know what, I hear what you're saying about these specific videos, I will take these videos down and I won't do that again. | ||
| Is there any chance that there would be a special conversation about her? | ||
| Because that's the one that this is really all about, I guess is what I'm saying. | ||
| If she wanted to talk to me personally and talk about this stuff, of course I would do that. | ||
| Of course I would. | ||
| Not that it has to be done publicly, but I'm happy to facilitate that. | ||
| No, it's fine. | ||
| I think one of the worst things that's going on right now is people not talking to each other. | ||
| I don't want to be one of those people that's not talking to each other about this kind of stuff. | ||
| If we miss something, or if there's something obviously wrong, I want to know about it. | ||
| I want it to be fair. | ||
| And that's important to me. | ||
| Is there any type of person right now that would set bells off just by setting up a Patreon account? | ||
| So the easiest example I can give you is if Milo Yiannopoulos today was like, alright, I'm jumping on Patreon. | ||
| Is there an inherent problem there? | ||
| So there are lots of people that would set bells off by setting up Patreon pages. | ||
| Terrorists, money launderers, fraudsters. | ||
| Right, so removing the strictly illegal people up to illegal activities, removing those people. | ||
| Somebody that happens to be controversial, someone who I expect from looking at your Twitter that you probably are not a big fan of, let's say someone like Milo, would that set off any bells internally as to can we even go about doing this? | ||
| Because the same people that really don't like Lauren, or the same people that like Lauren, like Milo, obviously. | ||
| Again, what I would say is, and see here's the other thing I think people don't understand about these sorts of decisions. | ||
| I don't, this is not my job, right? | ||
| I don't do our content policy. | ||
| Our team does our content policy. | ||
| So if there were, here's what I would say, if there were lots of incoming reports, they would look at a bunch of evidence, they'd make a determination, and they'd make a decision one way or the other after we like investigated it thoroughly. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And I'd like to sit here and be able to say I know all the answers, I have everything, but the truth is I don't. | ||
| We have to look at it, see if there's any manifest observable behavior that's against the content policy. | ||
| God, I feel like such a dork saying that. | ||
| I like keep repeating myself. | ||
| There's something kind of funny about a guy who's really an artist and a musician talking about terms of service. | ||
| That's quite a karmic thing you did there. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's been a few years of growing for me. | ||
| So the other page that you took down a couple days after this was this It's Going Down page, which is connected to either directly or loosely with Antifa. | ||
| So first off, a lot of people were saying to me, you see what they did there? | ||
| They took Lauren down and now they're just throwing us a bone by taking that one down. | ||
| Now I would argue that's not really throwing anyone a bone because having more things taken off the platform isn't What I personally would want, obviously it's not up to me, were these things happening in conjunction? | ||
| Was it a response where you were just trying to save face or whatever else? | ||
| So, I actually personally looked into this, because it was important to me. | ||
| I personally looked into this whole thing, but that very issue in particular, turns out that page was in the queue, in the trust and safety queue, before we even took down Lauren's page. | ||
| So, like, the people saying that, like, oh, this is just a response, and they're just trying to cover their ass, and blah, blah, blah, it's actually just not true. | ||
| When you say the queue, you mean the queue meaning to take down, or the queue to be looked at? | ||
| Like a trust and safety evaluation queue, where it's like, oh. | ||
| So to be looked at, not necessarily to be taken. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah, to be reviewed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But the thing is, the team, what do we have, like, right now there's about three people on the team, right? | ||
| So there's, they have a queue of pages. | ||
| It is very often, like, it happens all the time where they'll, like, look at a page, and then they'll look at another page, and look at another page, and we'll take down pages, you know, two weeks, three weeks apart, like, We don't batch pages all together that are like politically, you know, opposing and take them down at the same time to like seem like we're being fair. | ||
| Like, that's not how we do things. | ||
| We take them down in an order. | ||
| So folks who are saying that like, oh, we happen to take this page down right at the right moment, that means that they're just trying to cover their ass. | ||
| It's just not true. | ||
| All right, so you know what? | ||
| I think we should do this. | ||
| So I told the audience that we were gonna do a Q&A via Patreon and in Super Chat. | ||
| I wanna get to that. | ||
| I also know that you have to get back. | ||
| You agreed to do this in basically no time. | ||
| Literally, you didn't pause when I asked you to do this. | ||
| I want my audience to know that, because that is not something that happens often. | ||
| Basically, it never happens. | ||
| So we're gonna take literally a 30-second break, and then we're gonna jump into audience questions. | ||
| So the last thing I wanna ask you before that, though, is what would be your last pitch for the 200-so people that have canceled my page? | ||
| So I'm taking a brunt of this. | ||
| I mean, I took a financial hit. | ||
| It's over $1,000 a month. | ||
| As I said, we made some of that back on PayPal. | ||
| It's irrelevant. | ||
| To the purposes of this conversation, it's completely irrelevant. | ||
| But for those people, I don't know if you know what your internal numbers are and I'm sure you're not allowed to share them anyway, but for the people that you've now lost that you wanna get back, what would be your closing statement in why you think you did the right thing and why they can have their trust put back in Patreon? | ||
| Then we'll take a quick break and then we'll get to the audience questions. | ||
| Yeah, I'd just say that, and this is just like a matter of belief, like, if you don't believe us, fine. | ||
| But this isn't for the people, like, over here who don't believe us. | ||
| This is for the people who, like, who maybe think that some people in the world are good. | ||
| We are so rigorous and thoughtful about this kind of stuff. | ||
| We had the whole executive team looking at this. | ||
| We had the entire trust and safety team stringing together tons and tons of evidence. | ||
| We spent a lot of hours on this. | ||
| We will continue to be extra rigorous, extra thoughtful, extra careful around these issues. | ||
| I think we are so much more careful and thoughtful than other companies in dealing with these issues. | ||
| And certainly than people, I think, give us credit for based on some of the comments about us just doing things on a whim. | ||
| So, I guess my pitch would be like, look, there's a lot of smart people that are thinking very, very hard about this and making good, thoughtful, rigorous, evidence-based decisions. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I mean, at the end of the day, like, you know, it comes down to like, is this something that you You know, is this something where you're just, you know, you can't see it, you can't agree, you can't trust, you assume people are bad? | ||
| Or is this something where you actually think like, look, people are working hard to try and make this really fair. | ||
| And that's what I can tell you. | ||
| We are working very, very hard to try and make this fair. | ||
| And I would be remiss if I had you sitting here and I was able to look you in the eyes and didn't say that I want this to work. | ||
| As badly as you want this to work, I want this to work. | ||
| The thing that you created literally changed my life. | ||
| You're sitting in evidence of that. | ||
| So I want this to work. | ||
| It's why I wanted to have this conversation. | ||
| As I said to you right before we started, some people are gonna be more angry at me for whatever reason, some people will be more angry at you, and that's all just, it is what it is. | ||
| But I hope we've given them a little bit of taste of that, Things are kind of complex, and we'll go from there. | ||
| But before I even bother saying anything else, we're gonna take literally a 30-second break. | ||
| Great. | ||
| I'll refill your water. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right, 30-second break. | ||
| I'm gonna refill Jack's water, and then Patreon questions, which we've already got roughly four billion of them, and we'll jump into Super Chat as well. | ||
| 30 seconds! | ||
| I know I usually say a minute, and it takes three minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
30 seconds. | |
| . | ||
| Don't you? | ||
| I think we took 45 seconds there. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
| I'll make the 15 seconds up to you. | ||
| All right, here we go. | ||
| We have roughly four zillion questions. | ||
| We'll start with Super Chat quick. | ||
| I think you addressed this, but maybe there's something you can pin down a little closer. | ||
| Did Hope Not Hate lobby Patreon, or are you lying, or is Hope Not Hate lying? | ||
| You said shareholders have no influence on content. | ||
| Hope Not Hate is taking credit for successfully lobbying you guys. | ||
| So I did see some tweets, I guess, by someone from Hope Not Hate implying No. | ||
| that they did have something to do with this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Are you saying that's not the case? | ||
| Just to get an absolute whittle down answer on that. | ||
| No, here's what I'll say. | ||
| Everyone lobbies on these decisions. | ||
| We don't proactively police the community, right? | ||
| The reason that a page gets taken down is because we get reports through an official reporting system that leads us to take down a page. | ||
| So if they sent in a report, then we evaluated their report like we evaluated probably a hundred other reports. | ||
| So they did send in a report, right? | ||
| I actually don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They may have. | ||
| Yeah, but I honestly don't know. | ||
| But if they did, then we'd evaluate that report like we evaluate the hundred other reports that came in about that account. | ||
| All right, so from Patreon, and I think some of these are gonna be a little bit repetitive, but they might at least give you a chance to specify a couple of things. | ||
| A question about transparency. | ||
| Will you in the future be more upfront with providing the evidence behind your decisions as well as allowing the creator that you're looking at to voice their own defense? | ||
| So I think we know the answer to the voice of their own defense, because you will put in this policy of allowing them to discuss it. | ||
| But what about being transparent about laying out the case for the patrons? | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| So yes, we're going to do that. | ||
| For the patron side, I actually don't know what our policy is going to be there. | ||
| For the creator side, when we send an email to the creator, we're going to explain the very specific evidence, because I think they deserve to know. | ||
| Do we want to make that public? | ||
| I think in this particular case, I made a video talking about what the evidence was. | ||
| I don't think we're gonna be doing that every time. | ||
| It's just not scalable. | ||
| We can't do something like that. | ||
| But I do think we have to do a better job of explaining like why a particular crater got taken down. | ||
| That's super important. | ||
| Okay, I'm glad someone asked this on Patreon because I think it's a better version | ||
| of the question that I asked you. | ||
| So I asked you about, well, what if I was helping get gay people | ||
| out of Saudi Arabia, which I'm sure you would probably agree is okay | ||
| and that most people would agree with. | ||
| But this is, I think, a more specific point, which is, if a Patreon creator spends the funds promoting free speech and democracy in China, and that activity is illegal in China, would Patreon deplatform the creator? | ||
| So I think that's actually a better way of phrasing the question than I asked. | ||
| No, so here's what I would say. | ||
| If you violate a law in a country that is not the United States, but you violate a local law somewhere else, I actually don't think we have anything in our content policy about that right now. | ||
| Maybe we should, but we don't. | ||
| So yeah, violating local laws in international territories. | ||
| I think when we start internationalizing more and we change currencies and we allow for localization of language and stuff like that, we'll probably have to start getting into those sorts of issues. | ||
| But right now, I don't think there's anything in our content policy about violating local laws. | ||
| So basically, if I wanna start funding democracy in China, I better do it quick because, I mean, the truth is that once you guys start having those conversations, that's where the lawyers get involved, then there are connections. | ||
| I mean, I think the other fear that a lot of my audience has is that there are so many connections these days between politicians and the heads of all of these companies. | ||
| And I think that that's part of the fear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what can I say? | ||
| That certainly exists, although I don't think it really is as political as a lot of people think. | ||
| I think, honestly, it comes down to advertising and making sure that the platforms When YouTube makes a decision to demonetize a particular video, I think that sucks, and I'm sad that the ecosystem works that way. | ||
| If you look at actually what happened to YouTube, advertisers pulled out, right? | ||
| Because they didn't want their ads against a particular type of content. | ||
| YouTube had their hand forced at that point to basically make the system more friendly to advertisers, which unfortunately means more demonetization for creators. | ||
| But that's not a political issue. | ||
| That's not because they have ties to this particular government or that particular politician. | ||
| It's because advertisers are paying them and responsible for most of their revenue and don't want their ads run against those videos. | ||
| I just think that's a bad system. | ||
| I can make the argument that that's strongly misguided, but I see what you're pointing to. | ||
| What's your argument? | ||
| Well, that it's strongly misguided because A, first off, on YouTube especially, no one associates the ad as an endorsement of the content, ever. | ||
| It's just never happened. | ||
| But then even beyond just the general, you know, there's less inventory, so I understand that at a business level, but we do videos where we talk about free speech and we talk about dissent or religion and things like that. | ||
| Those videos, it's not that they're being demonetized, they're not even getting monetized in the first place. | ||
| So there's several problems there, but I know you're not a representative of YouTube. | ||
| But what I'm saying is like, If the advertisers want to pull out, they pull out. | ||
| Regardless of if it's a good decision or not. | ||
| Regardless of whether consumers associate the ad with the video or not. | ||
| Advertisers are pulling out. | ||
| Again, I think that has to do with the stakeholders in the ecosystem and bad design. | ||
| Advertising is a bad way to get creators paid. | ||
| It just doesn't do a good job. | ||
| From Patreon, have you reached out to Sam Harris? | ||
| And if so, what was his response? | ||
| I have reached out to Sam Harris. | ||
| We talked for a little while. | ||
| I don't know if he wants me to talk publicly about what he said to me, but I felt a lot better after our conversation. | ||
| But yeah, I would feel weird about putting that conversation on the record, because the expectation was that it was a private conversation. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| From Super Chat, does Jack know why the right-wing cartoonist Emily Forgive me if I'm pronouncing her last name wrong. | ||
| Yukus' account was removed a long time ago. | ||
| She's not an activist, so it was based on hate speech and racism. | ||
| Is that not a political decision? | ||
| I don't know why her account was removed. | ||
| I could look into it, but yeah. | ||
| Do you know who she is? | ||
| I don't know who she is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I can't ask you to comment on something that you don't know about. | ||
| Antifa has crossed the line multiple times from speech to aggression. | ||
| Will you take steps in their pages too? | ||
| You said to me during the break, as far as you know, there are no Antifa pages on Patreon right now? | ||
| No, I don't know of them. | ||
| I know we took down It's Going Down. | ||
| If there are other pages, I'm not aware of them right now. | ||
| But if there were other pages that exist, Antifa pages that exist right now, they would be removed? | ||
| Again, it depends on what they've done. | ||
| If they did something like It's Going Down did, where they publish an article that explains how to pour concrete over railroad tracks, then yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why was 8chan removed from Patreon? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Woof, we're gonna get into some stuff here. | ||
| They were allowing the distribution of child pornography on their servers. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Not okay. | ||
| I mean, actually, yeah, that's illegal and against our content policy. | ||
| Question for Jack, the complaint about these non-government ships | ||
| is that they are rescuing people and taking them over to Italy. | ||
| It's a clear loophole in immigration. | ||
| Is there any acknowledgement that this is what the groups are opposing, not specifically the rescuing? | ||
| So that's sort of where we started this whole thing out. | ||
| The very issue here seems to be, depending on which way you look at it, either these ships are rescuing people or they're actually taking part in something that's illegal in the first place. | ||
| Yeah, so again, I'm going to separate content policy from discussions of, like, who is and is not a refugee. | ||
| If you want to have that discussion again, happy to do it. | ||
| I would say for that particular issue, there are international laws around who is and isn't a refugee. | ||
| It's in the 1951 Refugee Convention that like over 145 countries have entered into. | ||
| And it's a legally binding international document. | ||
| I think one of the difficulties with that document is it doesn't lay out accountability | ||
| procedures around it. | ||
| So if you violate the laws in this treaty, nothing happens to you, which is kind of a | ||
| bad system in and of itself. | ||
| But yeah, the people who are saying like, oh, these people are not refugees, they're | ||
| immigrants, you know, technically there's due process to decide who is who. | ||
| And so these international conventions lay out what that due process is. | ||
| If you wish, literally, if you wish to be determined, if you wish to have your status determined as a refugee, then you're guaranteed certain rights as an asylum seeker. | ||
| But again, we're talking about law here. | ||
| not content policy. | ||
| I don't want to go, you know, I think we've gone far enough down that rabbit hole | ||
| because regardless, that's not for, all of those things have very little to do | ||
| with Lauren's account. | ||
| It's a separate issue. | ||
| Yeah, so I think we can only go that far. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I had a whole bunch of people asking about this sort of thing. | ||
| This is from Super Chat. | ||
| Black Lives Matter has blocked multiple ambulances and also utilized explosives during riots. | ||
| Why does Jack allow Antifa and other designated domestic terror organizations to raise money on his platform? | ||
| So there's a little disconnect there because we've already done the Antifa thing. | ||
| Black Lives Matter is not a domestic terror organization. | ||
| There's a certain sect of People that want it to be labeled as so but what about the the portion of black lives matter that? | ||
| Absolutely has talked about using violence in some case use violence and I mean people can Google it pretty pretty easily So so here's the thing. | ||
| I know you guys have met with the ray and all that. | ||
| Here's the thing with organizations where people people People assume and I think wrongfully so Like anyone on Patreon is allowed to interview or express support or talk about or you're allowed to talk, right? | ||
| We're not going to stop you from talking. | ||
| We're not going to stop you from interviewing anybody on this show. | ||
| But as soon as you put up a page and raise money to do bad things that are against the content policy, that's when we'll take your page down. | ||
| So I would say to that person, like, send us the page that is violating our content policy. | ||
| Send us the page that you think, like, and send us the tweet, the screenshot, from that particular creator who did that particular wrong thing. | ||
| But if you're gonna get into, like, this organization, this person interviewed them, and then that person interviewed this person and tied their support to blah blah, it's like, Send us the behavior. | ||
| Unless you're very clear with what the behavior is, then it just doesn't work. | ||
| You have to be ultra, ultra specific with content policy. | ||
| So to be clear, if there was a Black Lives Matter page that absolutely was calling for violence or do anything close to what IGD was doing or any of that, they would be under the same type of scrutiny? | ||
| Of course. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Um, okay, here's an interesting one. | ||
| This is from Patreon. | ||
| Cannabis is illegal according to federal law. | ||
| Are those who use, have used, or advocate the use of cannabis or other Schedule 1 substances | ||
| allowed on Patreon? | ||
| If yes, what felony behavior is allowable and whatnot? | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| It's a good one. | ||
| Again, I just feel like I'm repeating myself. | ||
| There's a difference between law and content policy, right? | ||
| So if you smoke pot and you're a creator, that's not against our content policy. | ||
| What if you were smoking pot on camera? | ||
| So now you're doing an action that is federally illegal. | ||
| I mean, even right now, I have a medical marijuana. | ||
| A little lower back pain. | ||
| If I was smoking pot right now on camera, which would be absolutely legal in the state of California, it's actually federally illegal. | ||
| But again, content policy is not federal law. | ||
| We have different mission, different guidelines than the law. | ||
| So no, I don't think there's anything in our content policy about smoking pot on camera. | ||
| Right, but so in this case, you would allow for a federally illegal behavior to be done as part of the content that's being created. | ||
| I think we would, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this is not easy. | ||
| I gotcha, I gotcha. | ||
| I can see it in you, it's not easy. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think that's against our policy. | ||
| It's not like against the mission of the company. | ||
| No, I think it'd be fine. | ||
| No, I think. | ||
| It is fine. | ||
| There are many examples of creators smoking pot that we would allow on Patreon. | ||
| This sort of gets to something that I brought up before, but maybe we can get a little whittled. | ||
| Dear Jack, do you know that a lot of people live in a climate of fear when it comes to the left | ||
| and seeing this takedown has made them feel more unsafe than ever, that it doesn't matter what you do, | ||
| the platforms will come after you. | ||
| So that's what I'm saying where a lot, that's one of the reasons I love Patreon. | ||
| This is the refuge for these people that are upset with a lot of these other things. | ||
| So that sort of gets what I was saying about that in a way now, the first dam has been broken here. | ||
| And I think a lot of people are just gonna sort of hold that against you regardless. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I'm aware that there's fear. | ||
| And I think we talked about that half hour ago. | ||
| I think it sucks that there's that fear. | ||
| I think it's legitimate. | ||
| There's a lot of demonetization that's happening right now. | ||
| And I think the pains of the advertising ecosystem are starting to become exceptionally clear. | ||
| But again, I think the thing that makes Patreon different is we don't have the advertiser as a stakeholder in the ecosystem. | ||
| That makes our job a lot easier because it's one less person that we | ||
| have to worry about making happy. | ||
| Right? Our revenue isn't coming from advertisers, it's coming from consumers. | ||
| That just makes this easier and safer and wider. | ||
| This is from Super Chat. Just as an aside to what Jack has said, there's a lot of people | ||
| who use Patreon and create explicit or implied pornographic content. | ||
| Again, so we define porn very, very specifically on Patreon. | ||
| and Sarah Underwood, these are three of some of the largest creators on the site. | ||
| So I don't know who those three people are. | ||
| I'm guessing you probably do, or at least know some of them. | ||
| I'm not familiar with their content. | ||
| Again, so we define porn very, very specifically on Patreon. | ||
| You can imagine how much detail I went into to write this document with this person. | ||
| Way more detail than I ever wanted to go into to define what is the difference between porn and art. | ||
| From a high level, I would say if it's rated R, it's okay. | ||
| Like, we won't deal, we won't do pornographic films, but you can make R-rated content where there's, you know, we're an arts company. | ||
| You can take a nude picture of somebody. | ||
| You can draw a nude painting. | ||
| But on Instagram, you can't do that, right? | ||
| They'll allow flagging of content if there's breasts or something in the content. | ||
| But that's fine on Patreon. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Can you ask Jack about Sargon of Akkad and why he was looked at but Anita Sarkeesian was not looked into for her providing false information about him? | ||
| So I'm not sure what that one's about. | ||
| I don't know about that either. | ||
| Again, with these, I think a lot of the questions that we're starting to get, a lot of the questions that we've gotten so far are like, is does this violate your policy? Does that violate your | ||
| policy? And I understand that people really want specificity over that, | ||
| which is one of the reasons that like the trust and safety team is going to work very hard to make our | ||
| policy a lot more clear and transparent to the community. | ||
| For those particular questions, does this violate your policy? Does that violate your policy? | ||
| You can't, you literally can't answer those questions without getting ultra, ultra specific. | ||
| In order to answer that question, our team builds like 10 page reports about whether or not there's a policy violation. | ||
| And it requires just so much evidence and rigor and detail. | ||
| So like a question that's asked in one sentence, you literally can't get to the bottom of it. | ||
| So what about the manifest observable behavior of groups like Black Lives Matter? | ||
| Their protests have blocked busy streets in major cities many times. | ||
| How many ambulances have they stopped from getting to where they needed to go? | ||
| So we've addressed Black Lives Matter, but I think that that's a good point, that we've consistently seen this as part of the protest. | ||
| Ambulances are blocked. | ||
| Protesting in the middle of a public street is actually illegal. | ||
| You may be for it, but it actually is illegal. | ||
| So what happens to any of these offshoot patrons that pop up that are associated with that. | ||
| Yeah, so we had a, we actually had a discussion about this at the, at the office, cause it's a, it's a important | ||
| nuance question. Let's say you hold a protest and it's, it's a, it's a, you know, you're | ||
| protesting whatever you don't agree with and you're in the street. | ||
| And a lot of people show up and the protest gets organized and it becomes a thing. | ||
| And at that protest, There's a lot of people there and somebody trips and falls and bashes their head open and dies. | ||
| Are we going to hold you responsible as a creator for that? | ||
| Is that a violation of our content policy? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| We had a discussion about that for quite a long time, but basically our thought was like, look, while you were exercising your right to free speech and you were doing what is okay according to the guidelines and according to the law, something bad happened, But in these cases where they know that they're putting people out in the middle of the street, which is illegal, or they're stopping other parades from, you know, they're stopping the gay pride parade in Toronto until they sign, you know, basically extorting them until they sign their, you know, charter on, we're gonna, you know, go with you on all of these specific points. | ||
| That's a little different than someone accidentally falling and hurting their head. | ||
| Yeah, again, I'm not familiar with the situation. | ||
| If you were to show a creator who had pulled their car in front of an ambulance, that creator, not like a creator who had interviewed an organization who did something like that, but if the creator themselves pulled their car in front of an ambulance, we would take that creator down no matter what organization they're a part of. | ||
| So on the speech versus action part, If you had a creator who was saying, okay, I'm going to this event, one of the things you can do is pull your car in front of a police car to be there. | ||
| Now this is all, this person just said it. | ||
| They didn't actually do it. | ||
| Do you make a distinction there? | ||
| So we do, which is the reason we took down the IGD page, right? | ||
| That wasn't a case of them, I'm pretty sure they didn't actually themselves pour concrete over railroad tracks. | ||
| They published an article about how to do this. | ||
| If you're advocating for violent, you know, Crime or whatever, that's also not okay. | ||
| So yeah, we do make a distinction between, like for instance, you can't, on Patreon, you can't, right, doxing is not okay. | ||
| You can't dox somebody, which is another reason we took down IGD. | ||
| But you also can't go to your audience and say, hey folks, go find this person's home address and publish it all over the internet. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| So yeah, we do make a distinction between what you can tell people to do and what you can do yourselves. | ||
| That's all in the policy. | ||
| All right, I know you have a hard out, so we're just gonna do two more, and then you've survived. | ||
| Hi, Jack. | ||
| How does Patreon define a, quote, attack on someone? | ||
| I'm getting this from your community guidelines regarding hate speech. | ||
| So this is a good question, because again, it gets to just the specificity of all of these words. | ||
| And that's why I don't like the phrase hate speech, because what's one man's free speech is another man's hate speech. | ||
| So how do you define attack? | ||
| I don't know how we define attack. | ||
| I'd have to pull up our content policy. | ||
| I know that we distinguish between a personal person and a public person. | ||
| So you can say certain things about a president or a politician that you can't say about a particular individual. | ||
| We have a bullying policy in our guidelines. | ||
| You can't bully a private person. | ||
| I actually don't know how that's defined off the top of my head. | ||
| But we have definitions for these types of things, and we do draw some important distinctions there. | ||
| If you wanna say whatever you want about Trump or about Obama, you can say way more about those folks than you can say about your classmate in school. | ||
| All right, final question. | ||
| Why should people keep supporting creators like me on Patreon? | ||
| Gosh. | ||
| I want a closing statement here. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Uh, it sucks that it's 2017. | ||
| And you've got creators with millions of fans getting paid a few hundred bucks a month. | ||
| That sucks. | ||
| I still can't believe the internet has made it this far. | ||
| And you've got a person who's improving the lives of a million people and getting 20,000 people a month reading their blog or watching their videos or reading their articles. | ||
| And that person gets paid 300 bucks a month in ad revenue. | ||
| That makes my heart hurt. | ||
| I can't believe that we've allowed this to happen. | ||
| The systemic abuse of creative people is... | ||
| Demoralizing to me. | ||
| And there are 80 people in San Francisco who get up every morning and want to change that. | ||
| Want to fix that. | ||
| And people in the world can change that and they can fix that by supporting creators on Patreon. | ||
| By giving 10 bucks a month, 5 bucks a month to do a little part and to change the way the system works. | ||
| So yeah, do it because it's the right thing to do because the world would suck without creators. | ||
| And because, you know, while art is now free, while videos are free, while music is free, that's not a question anymore, right? | ||
| Creators aren't free, right? | ||
| This studio isn't free. | ||
| It's so important that people realize that and take their part to change that. | ||
| Yeah, well, I appreciate you coming in. | ||
| I know making those calls on Thursday probably was not easy for you. | ||
| I think I was one of the first ones, because we were first thing in the morning. | ||
| And as I said at the beginning, I think it's worth repeating, you did not pause when I said, will you come on the show? | ||
| I think you said, gosh, I'd love to, without even pausing. | ||
| This is not what CEOs of these companies do. | ||
| I wish they did. | ||
| So I would love to have Zuckerberg and Jack and the rest of them in here to talk about these things, because I think it can allay a lot of the fears. | ||
| That being said, there's going to be a certain amount of people that their fears won't be allayed or a new set will crop up. | ||
| I'll keep talking about it. | ||
| I hope you guys will keep trying to get better at what you do. | ||
| And maybe next time I'm in San Francisco, I'll jump up there and come to the offices. | ||
| That'd be great. | ||
| We'd love to have you. | ||
| And I thank you for coming in. | ||
| And the conversation is obviously going to continue. | ||
| And maybe we can facilitate something with Lauren or whatever else there is. | ||
| And thanks for doing this. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| All right, and thank you guys for watching. | ||
| And of course, we will continue the discussion about this today and for the next weeks and months coming. |
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